Agricultural Address. ^ 
dant leisure it enjoys. The great freedom from excitement, pecu- 
liar to the farmer more than any other class of citizens, gives 
opportunity for cool and unmolested investigation, and hielps to 
form a character which the clergyman covets most for his hearer, 
and which our judiciary system most needs for the jury box. The 
long winter evenings, and many winter days, are the school hours 
of the farmer. His agricultural, political, or religious papers, 
and his school library volumes, he may read and digest; and his 
practical habits peculiarly fit him to make a direct appropriation 
of his knowledge as fast as he acquires it. 
A great change in this respect has come over our agricultural 
population within the last ten or fifteen years. Till within this 
period, there had been, in this country, but little attention given 
to agriculture as a science. Art had proceeded, in a great measure, 
at guess-work, in the cultivation of the soil, furnishing as a result, 
in many instances, no adequate compensation for the hard toil 
spent in the business. From this cause the business was not 
appreciated according to its real importance by but few persons- 
Individual effort was put forth in certain quarters to place the 
subject in its proper light before the public. Agriculture as the 
main source of revenue to the country, was urged in the guberna- 
torial messages, prompting legislative action not only to protect 
but to advance this vast interest. Private enterprise set on foot 
geological surveys, with a view to develope the agricultural re- 
sources of particular sections of the country. 
Science in the schools was at the same time making extended 
analyses of the elements of the globe, showing thus to the world 
that she could be employed as an instrument of wealth, alike by 
the manufacturer in the arts, and by the farmer upon his lands. 
Inventions of improved implements of husbandry gradually dis- 
placed the old fashioned heavy wrought hoe, and the clumsy har- 
row, and the friction working plow, and to the valuable substitutes 
for these, added other labor-saving articles, as the cultivator, the 
drill-barrow, the horse-rake, and the threshing-machine. Agri- 
cultural journals even issued, at first with meagre support, which 
labored to show the farmer his proper position in society, and to 
